The ability to reach young voters and GOTV has always been a challenge in non-Presidential elections. A June election made it all the more challenging as Universities were not in session and the young voters were scattered.

... what little we accomplished is now lost.

Of course that's 20/20 hindsight; Walker may have won last week anyway. And yes, many of us in the rank-and-file pulled for the earliest possible recall (myself included). But we're not the Party leadership.

Additionally, having primaries, then the recall so soon after, further damaged our efforts. Walker had spent a zillion bucks before we even got started. Strong Party leadership might have been able to form a more unified effort.

I expect my Party leaders to be astute enough to understand these things, and Party leadership certainly should have understood the dynamics outlined in this article, and acted accordingly.

Finally, I see NO EFFORT WHATSOVER to leverage the 30,000 "Recall Walker Volunteers". This group (who stood in the rain, and the cold, and suffered intimidation, verbal abuses and even violence) should be the engine that drives Progressive causes in Wisconsin for a generation. They're being totally ignored. Those of us who signed our names as circulators on dozens of petitions (hundreds in some cases) are being ignored.

To me at least, this is inexcusable.

was not up to the Democratic Party alone. My impression is that Mike Tate and the leadership would have waited for a November recall election because of the difficulty of doing petitions in the winter at holiday time (which worked out fine anyway) and the promise of a higher turnout in the presidential election. However, the other groups involved seemed to want to start as soon as legally possible. Anyone was free to file on their own at the earliest moment and then the party would have to go along or create a split in the movement. Anyway, that's what I remember. It didn't help that the laws concerning the primary procedure and campaign finance worked against us.

How many of the petitioners joined the party or decided to work with the unions or OFA or the other groups on the recent election? That would be interesting to know.

... and unite them on the best course seems to be a failure of leadership.

Very interesting question about the fate of our petitioners. I know several that remain involved, working on campaigns. Sadly, they've done this with virtually NO support from DPW.

Thanks for contributing, and for all you do.

I think the recall would have happened when it did. Tate actually wanted it on the Presidential originally and I think that would have been the best date to have it too. The problem with that approach is after the first round of Senate recalls the verification periods extended beyond what the state constitution stated so their was no way to concretely predict when the election would take place.

I don't really want to ignite a reburn of all that, but I think many who understood WI voting dynamic thought raising the recall to national importance would have helped the cause.

....I think we have some thinking, planning and work to do...

My county went red this time...I'm not sure why because we had a terriffic turnout..

on edit...just checked..we went for Romney by about 1000 votes but also went for Tammy by about 900 votes...

The Repubs successfully divided our county up in 2 new senate districts and two more assembly districts:

In the South...went 50-50 for legislative races...
Vruwink for Assembly by a good margin and Lassa for Senate by a good margin...

but Suder (R) in the Northwest by over 1300 and Spiros (R) by about 600 in the Northeast

It is suspicious that some very significant questions about the special election irregularities are overlooked, if not obfuscated by this analysis, as if some things are shunted out of sight. One of those is how the very bluest part of Wisconsin, the City of Milwaukee, shifted soo red compared to the rest of the state.

http://jqjacobs.net/politics/spreadsheets.html#wisconsin

Several areas are suspicious, but that epicenter is the jurisdictions Walker controlled before moving to Madison! The very landscape where abuse of power to win elections is being prosecuted against Walker" lackeys and hirees!!

If VOTES Could Talk?
http://myplayfulself.com/wordpress/archives/5339

.... digest what happened, how it was done, and what it means.

The obvious implication is that elections were/are being rigged. Is any official investigating this? John Chisholm? The FBI?

You know a crime has been committed, but you got there too late!
And you know that getting there too late does not mean the crime wasn't committed. After all, the vault got emptied!

A lot of smoothing goes on when very general considerations are applied to a statewide data set. When counties are analyzed, a different pattern can emerge, one averaged away when the whole state is considered. This happens again when precincts are analyzed. At the precinct level major anomalies can be quite clear, but they can also be apparent when comparing counties and correlating county data with the demographics the article presents. When focusing in closer, do the same results prevail or is variance found?

This is a great article by Craig Gilbert and this is exactly our problem. I remember after 2010 the DPW thought are base showed up but we lost the swing voters. What this article shows is that our base sat home in the 2010 and 2012 governors elections. The young, minority, and low income voters vote in a Presidential because its a Presidential. The Republicans get near Presidential turnout ever single election. We do not need to get our entire Presidential electorate out to vote in order to win in the off years and supreme court elections but we cannot have a 400,000+ vote drop off between the different elections if we expect to win.

This is what former State Senator Gary George talked about in an interview with wispolitics in 2011 when discussing if democrats should do recalls at the time. He mentioned how we would lose the money we have and if we don't win we are going to be stuck with a republican legislature for a long time and that is bad for low income people who need the democrats in charge.

If there was fraud in previous elections, the conclusions in this article and the data are in fact FALSE. One thing rings true, "part of" the explanation.

Coyotl if their was fraud Craig Gilbert would be writing about it and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal would be selling papers across the nation. The fact that we have about 400,000+ drop off democratic voters across the state is why we have lost off year elections. We lost these elections under the old election laws with a Democratic Administration and the new election laws with a Republican Administration.

If VOTES Could Talk?
http://myplayfulself.com/wordpress/archives/date/2011/05

Stealing America Vote by Vote
http://vimeo.com/2019192

This has nothing to do with elections in Wisconsin. I looked at 2004 and I believe Bush won that year. 50k votes is a pretty substantial lead.

How about the same sort of anomaly showing up in each and every one of the presidential primaries, in 2012, in your own what used to be your father's the formerly responsible Republican Party!

Two part story, already posted in other threads in this group:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1210/S00105/rigged-elections-for-romney-michael-collins.htm

Part II:

http://www.americanpolitics.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4349&Itemid=2

Also, from the U.K., retired NSA analyst:

http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-proves-gop-is-stealing-elections/article20598.html

The biggest chunk of votes were flipped in the primary here in Wisconsin, from Frothy to RobMe:



Edit Add:

It's admittedly pure speculation, but if someone took the time to perform some audits and poked around
and investigated, who knows, maybe they'd find a connection between the statistical anomalies in all
those elections, and the recent (chart-busting) record for the most profitable investment in the United States.
(Buy yourself some lobbyists!)

Exit Polls are not always precisely accurate. Who would want to say they were supportive of Mitt Romney? Romney did not have a lot of support from party activist a lot of money that helped get primary voters behind him. Exit polls are a helpful tool in trying to detect public opinion, however keep in mind that exit polls are not an exact science, that is why we count the votes.

Improvement in the electoral system comes by electing Democrats to office who will implement universal registration and vote by mail.

Last edited Tue Nov 13, 2012, 12:43 AM - Edit history (2)

That's completely independent of exit polls. Those have been exceptionally accurate in places like most of Europe. Where they're actually trying to confirm that the vote tabulation has been accurate. Or for an early indicator of what the vote count is likely to be, before there's been enough time to hand count the ballots. In most of Europe -- partly as a result of those spot-on exit polling results -- eVoting has been abandoned. Not too many months ago, for example, Ireland sold their electronic tabulation machines for scrap. For whatever minimal value they had as raw material for recycling.

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/54m-voting-machines-scrapped-for-9-each-3153437.html

From that link...

THE Government has sold the infamous €54m e-voting machines for scrap -- for €9.30 each.

A huge fleet of trucks will begin removing the 7,500 machines from 14 locations on Monday.

They will be taken to a Co Offaly recycling company, KMK Metals Recycling Ltd in Tullamore, where they will be stripped down and shredded....

...Scrapping the machines brings to an end the embarrassing e-voting debacle which has cost the taxpayer more than €54m since it emerged the expensive equipment was faulty.

They could not be guaranteed to be safe from tampering. And they could not produce a printout so that votes/results could be double-checked.


P.S.

I'm not with you on that, "vote by mail" plan. In Greg Palast's, "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits," there's a list at the back of the book that spells out 7 Ways to Beat the Ballot Bandits. Number one on that list is -------> "Don't Go Postal."